SOURCE: "Ernie Pyle," in Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, pp. 112-21.

In the following essay, originally published in 1945, Jarrell praises Pyle's ability to evoke in his writing the experience of war.

He wrote like none of the rest. The official, pressagent, advertising-agency writing that fills the newspapers, magazines, and radio with its hearty reassuring lies, its mechanical and heartless superlatives; the rhetorical, sensational, and professional pieces of ordinary Time-Life journalism—the same no matter what the subject, who the writer; the condescending, preoccupied work of "real writers" officially pretending to be correspondents for the duration: all this writing about the war that by its quality denies the nature and even the existence of the war, he neither competed with nor was affected by. He was affected by, obsessed with, one thing—the real war: that is, the people in it, all those...